A text, or an epigraph, for what I am going to say: some lines from John Ciardi’s poem about the Birdman of Alcatraz who was, among other things, a trickster of sorts. These words are from Ciardi’s poem “Snickering in Solitary”: In every life sentence some days are better than others; even, sometimes, better than...

Mikhail Gorbachev has evidently imagined that a government turned virtuous would elicit a generous response from a naturally virtuous people. It is an “immaculate misconception” because the Russian people, always lethargic in the face of their leviathan government, have endured in the Soviet experiment a unique erosion of Edward Gibbon’s old Greco-Roman ideal of civic...

American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...

The discussion of “the end of history” by Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest (Summer 1989) has led to comment by numerous publicists. Among others Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Richard Bernstein, and a feature writer for Time have evaluated Fukuyama’s hypothetical arguments that the world may be moving toward a democratic capitalist final age: a...

In 1967, The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that by the 1980’s American multinationals would have virtually bought up European industry. A decade later, there was another big scare—the Arabs were going to buy up all the US farmland (some farmers now wish this had been true, since the price of farmland subsequently collapsed)....

“They’re wiping out our industries,” said my southern California friend, staring moodily out across the Pacific ocean beyond which They—the Japanese—presumably lurking even as he spoke. “They’re buying up all our land,” confirmed his wife. “Of course, we’re so stupid, we just let them.” “They need another earthquake over there,” her brother-in-law joked darkly. “That...

“Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew, And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four— And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.” Rudyard...

“The Lyric of Tradition” is an essay written nearly twenty-five years ago by the late Donald Davidson, celebrated American poet, critic, and philosopher of cultural change who developed, out of his own artistic practice, a comprehensive theory of the role of literature in a healthy society. It was a view not at all like those...

The word’s been out for some time: they’re all gone, not a functioning one left. Statistics coming down from on high in the 1970’s “proved” that the small farm—defined as that with a total income of less than $20,000 annually—was about shot. This came as something of a surprise to those still living and working...

Thomas Jefferson believed that virtue was to be found in the Spartan simplicity of ancient Greece rather than in the decadent cities of Caesar’s Rome. Agriculture, Jefferson wrote, was what developed moral and political virtue. Big cities corrupted people, he thought, and neither city men of commerce and capital nor city men who labored could...

An Exercise in Calculated Hysteria The semiautomatic rifle has been part of the American scene for nearly a century. In 1903 the Winchester Repeating Arms Company marketed the first commercially successful semiautomatic rifle. It was not designed as a military arm, and no sales were made to the US Army. The new rifle was marketed...

She was a witch, I swear, she was a real witch! —Gogol When my novella, which I was writing obsessively all my senior year at the Academy and a year after that, was accepted by a publisher and I was given a modest advance, I decided to buy myself an apartment. I, of course, didn’t...

Somebody recently did a “study” purporting to discover that at-home mothers spend hardly any more time daily with their children than mothers who work full-time outside the home. This is a neat trick on the part of the at-home moms surveyed, and I would like to know how they manage it. They must have superb...

Historically, the primary function of schooling has been to teach the young how to live responsibly and productively in their own society. In our day, the notions of civic, familial, and vocational obligations have been virtually banished from pedagogy. Today’s ethically and morally barren system of education has not only failed to fortify its students...

In 525 A.D. the Lady Philosophy reminded Boethius, in his death-cell, that true philosophers must think body, rank, and estate of less importance than their understanding of what was truly their own. This understanding of philosophy, which is also Epictetus’s and Aurelius’s, as something more than a pleasant enough word game, has been neglected by...

Why do we call it liberal education? When an eighteen-year-old graduates from high school and goes off to college to pick up a smattering of history and literature, why should we describe his course of study as the liberal arts? Educators once knew the answers to these questions, but it has been many years since...

For over a decade now, it’s been commonplace for our leaders to urge us to put Vietnam behind us. My wife, Sybil, and I were face to face with our good friend George Bush when he said it again at his Inauguration in January. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society has front row seats at...

Even in an age of glasnost, hardly anyone troubles to recall that when the Soviet Union occupied East Germany in 1945 it kept two Nazi concentration camps in full use for nearly five years, till February 1950, and at their old task of death. Soviet Buchenwald comes as a surprise, and that surprise is perhaps...

The twin centenaries of the English and French revolutions are now upon us—1689 and 1789—and they seem fated to coincide with a moment when the word “revolution” has lost all its prestige and even much of its point. In 1987, for example, Paris was shaken by a book expressively called The Cost of the French...

She was a handsome woman, Raylene Thomason, not what you’d call beautiful, but with Cherokee blood that gave her a broad pleasant face with a clean jawline and steady dark eyes. She took her looks so much for granted that it seemed she paid no attention, and maybe she didn’t. Her appearance was useful for...

“Thanatology” or “death education” now competes with driver’s ed and “social problems” for the attention of the nation’s high schoolers. First introduced on America’s college campuses in the 1960’s by such luminaries as Edgar Jackson, Richard Kalish, Robert Kastenbaum, and Herman Feifel, death education has, like many other dubious pedagogical experiments, trickled down to the...

Many words current in our culture carry within them a whole buried world of political assumptions and psychological payoffs. Just to use these words is to submit yourself to a powerful attempt by the words’ coiners or redefiners to shape reality and to impose a view of it that they consider advantageous to themselves. Often...

The relations of religious faith with political life in the modern world are riddled with paradoxes. In the Middle East, rapid secularization has provoked a fundamentalist revulsion, which seeks vainly to stem the tide of modernity that, at the same time, gives it all its strength. Middle Eastern fundamentalism is little more than a modernist...

Southerners are not like other Americans. Significant cultural differences have always separated them from the North. Even today cultural variations between Southern black and white people are fewer than those between white Southerners and white Northerners. In other words, the population of the United States is more divided culturally along regional lines than along racial...

The familiar lane is rutted with two deep truck tracks. “This always happens when it rains,” I think, and worry about getting stuck until I remember that the rain was two days ago and the ruts would have hardened by now, forming a two-lane trail to the farmhouse, Grandma’s house, “Grandma in the country.” Grandma...

Declining test scores. Illiterate, spiritless, and passive graduates who have little motivation to find a job or succeed. Youngsters with no skills to compete in the marketplace. This is the tragic record of American public education, after billions of dollars and 127 years of direct federal funding. The results seem more appropriate for a rebellious...

Imagine yourself going ahead in time—60 years ahead. Imagine yourself in the People’s Republic of North America, in the year 2050. In discussing the rise and fall of the American civilization, it will be necessary to examine the situation at the last time when historians felt this society could have saved itself from disintegration. Consequently,...

Last summer I was standing next to a great bull buffalo in western Kansas. He was mad and had a right to be. My buddy Joe Kramer, along with other men from Kansas Fish & Game, had this great American bison in an animal squeeze while they took a blood sample and gave him a...

Out of thin air—or of mythic consciousness—a Texas governor once plucked unhesitatingly the mot juste. The governor, Allan Shivers, who served back in the 1950’s, was indignant over some piece or other of legislative tomfoolery. As he saw it, the whole enterprise was downright “un-Texan.” “Un-Texan.” Right there we had the nub of the matter....

The misadventures of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the hands of publishers and editors has recently been in the news. Many of the commentators seem to believe that what Joyce suffered was unusual, and that most contemporary authors are treated better. Listen to Thomas Marc Parrott (writing in 1934) on George Bernard Shaw: Mr. Shaw, for...

“Publishing is something I sort of drifted into.” —Gary Fisketjon In a world, ours, in which large and small atrocities are our daily fare and to which atrocities we often seem to have become so ruthlessly accustomed as to have surrendered our ability to raise our eyebrows or to perform any moral gesture whatsoever above...

“Poetry is the most overproduced commodity on the market, next to zucchini.” —Judson Jerome, Writer’s Digest poetry columnist since 1960 According to a 1985 study cited by Writer’s Digest Books, 23.3 percent of all people who think of themselves as writers—or “more than two million people“—write poetry for publication. It follows that there are then...

When Bob Woodward published Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, in October of 1987, two things made that book news. One was his assertion that William Casey, the late director of the CIA, had admitted to knowing about the transfer of funds in the Iran-contra deal. The other was the skepticism over Woodward’s claim...

“PEN international is working for your release,” my lawyer told me. In the bare, mean interview room of the Belgrade District Prison he smiled at me, and I smiled back, because the mikes could not pick that up. There were no TV cameras there, yet, to monitor our winks and nods—the language of slaves, as...

People who “think ahead,” like Prometheus, have always constructed Utopias which are the outflow of their reflections and ideas—in other words, of their ideologies. On the other hand, most Americans who call themselves “conservatives” manifest a hostility towards ideologies and even more towards Utopias. “Ideology” as a term was invented by Count Destutt de Tracy,...

For a long time I thought I knew how to evade the discourse of the Grand Idea. It began when I was in the Yugoslav People’s Army. The war was barely over, but victory brought no greater liberty to those who had suffered the Nazi occupation, and the brainwashing in the barracks grew more and...

Academic historians are too uncritically receptive to Utopian thinking. Too many believe in what Kari Mannheim described as the striving for a new world order, an order which “would shatter all existing reality.” This utopianism should not be identified too closely with historical materialism—or with Marxism, which claims to rest on a materialist foundation. Academic...

Whatever the number of pluses in the portrait of Reagan that is beginning to take shape in the final months of his two-term presidency, there will be minuses also, and most of these will stem from his conduct of foreign policy and national defense. At first thought, this is almost bizarre. Wasn’t Reagan the leader...

In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern France), the Near East became the Middle...

“Nothing, at first sight, seems less important than the external formalities of human behavior,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, “yet there is nothing to which men attach more importance. They can get used to anything except living in a society which does not share their manners. The influence of the social and...

“We don’t like it when someone from outside teaches us how to live.” Thus spake Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov in reaction to President Reagan’s emphasis on human rights this summer in Moscow. The Soviet leaders were displeased by Reagan’s decision to meet with dissidents during his free time away from the summit meetings with General...

Americans are perennially tempted to believe that Soviet armament is a reaction to American armament, and therefore reversible by American disarmament. For years we allowed that hope to guide our military policy: beginning in the late 1960’s, the United States exercised unilateral restraint in nuclear construction for more than a decade. American-produced IGBM warheads were...

“I wanna go back and do it all over But I can’t go back I know I wanna go back ’cause I’m feeling so much older But I can’t go back I know” —Popular song by Eddie Money (1986, CBS Inc.) Mostly we take space for granted so long as we have enough of it....

“Three million years The Spirit, ranging as it will, In sun, in darkness, lives in change. Changed and not changed. The spirit hears In drifting fern the morning air.” —Janet Lewis, “Fossil, 1975” What is it that poetry does and is? We can say that poetry is about why people do things, and about what...

“Le reve est une seconde vie.“ —Nerval T.S. Eliot has become so thoroughly exalted, especially among conservative intellectuals, as the greatest poetic avatar of Western civilization in modern times (a role he must share, though, with Yeats and Pound) that it may shock many to notice the unmistakable oriental elements embedded in even his most...

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, when she was asked her opinion of her cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, described him as “One third mush and two thirds Eleanor.” The same could be said of FDR’s creation, the welfare state: one third mush; two thirds Eleanor. The New Deal was revolutionary in its scope, and like every social revolution...

With the falling leaves and falling temperatures, hordes of newspeople looking for the hungry and homeless descended on the missions and the shelters. Now collectively called Street People, Streetniks (my term) became the “darlings of the press”; every day, in every paper, we are brought up to date about them. USA Today for example, recently...

“You only have I known among all the families of the earth.” —Amos 3:2 The early chapters of the Bible present two major stories of judgment: the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. The first, the story of the dramatic “liquidation” of the vast majority of the human race, has no parallel in recorded history,...